Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

THE UNHAPPIEST OF ALL MEN 363Here, after twenty-three years, the misunderstood artist-prince spitshis contempt into the faces of his companions in misery in the Viennalodging-house; of Hanisch, for example, who sold postcards andbrought in sausages, while the young idealist read three newspapers atonce and pondered the deepest questions in the world. Hitler deliveredthis speech on the necessity of keeping the 'sub-human' in deferentialrespect in September, 1933, when he was already dictator; and scarcelyanything else characterizes the man and his cause as much as theintrusion of such brutality into a discussion on art. Art must be brutal.The 'races chosen for higher things' must finally realize — this is theheartfelt wish of the unrecognized artist-prince — that art is not a matterfor any 'absurd international humanitarianism,' but their own privilege,to be defended against the sub-humans: 'Art cannot be divided fromblood. It is the expression of the psychic sentiments of a people.'Every race has its ideal of beauty, and we Aryans have ours; yes, bythis ideal of beauty we recognize ourselves; it is the surest sign of ourinvisible order, which has existed everywhere, yet nowhere: 'The idealof beauty of the ancient peoples will be eternal as long as men of thesame nature, because of the same origin, inhabit the earth. . . . Everypolitically heroic people seeks in its art the bridge to a no less heroicpast. The Greeks and Romans, then, become so close to the Germansbecause they must all seek their roots in one and the same basic race,and hence the immortal achievements of the old peoples exert again andagain their attractive effect on their racially related descendants.'He was working on a manuscript, in which he wanted to draw theportrait of the artist genius who molds his people. He discussed thework for whole nights with Alfred Rosenberg, who had studied to be anengineer and architect, and like himself had never done any creativework in the field. Some of the conclusions arrived at in theseconversations were put down in another book which Rosenberg waswriting at the same time. While Hitler, with his endless brooding, neverfinished his work, Rosenberg in 1928 wrote 'Finis' to his own. Heentitled the book with a slogan which, as he probably failed to suspect,was put into circulation by Georges Sorel, the French socialist,syndicalist, and friend of Bolsheviks.